Gaming Glut

What a glorious time to be alive. The electronic game medium has expanded to the point that we don’t have to ask ourselves if we’re in the mood to play a game; we ask ourselves what kind of game we’re in the mood to play. For a gaming chameleon like myself, someone interested in the entire spectrum of gaming styles, this is the most generous of blessings, and the cruelest of curses. I play games because I enjoy them, but I also play games to stay current on what’s new, to check on the progress of a promising developer, to explore blind spots in my back catalogue, to experience a genre I don’t enjoy, per se, but still wish to understand. The list goes on… Rough life, I know. I’m not complaining. I’m just here checking in with you, dropping a brief line to let you know what I’ve been up to since I haven’t been publishing.

First and foremost, I’ve been playing three games for a long-form article you’ll see here soon. One of them I’d already finished, but the other two I’d only dabbled in, and I needed to see them through to the end, at least once, in order to fully develop my thoughts. None of the three are particularly long, one of them is relatively difficult however. I hope to have the article finished by the end of the week.

Dabbling is something I have a problem with. It comes from my aforementioned desire to stay current on things. So while I’ve been working on the piece described above, I found myself stepping out on my work games because of three new Switch releases: Steamworld Dig 2, Thimbleweed Park, and Golf Story. All three were as delightful as the early press had led me to believe, and they swallowed up some hours. Cuphead finally released on Xbox, I gave it a quick look and thought it was great, then decided to shelve it until I could exclusively dedicate a day or three to it.

Then of course, there is my very much first-world-struggle: trying to write about games for a living while loving to play games as a hobby. In my off time, I’ve been sticking to the grind in Destiny 2 (284 Hunter climbing that ladder), I’ve been tackling Bloodborne finally, and I made the foolish decision to start Persona 5, just in case I wanted to feel completely overwhelmed by my gaming life. And if you still think I somehow have a handle on all of this, I’ll add this little nugget: I never finished MGS 5: The Phantom Pain on my Xbox One, but it’s about to become the free game on PS+ for the month of October, and there’s a little voice in the back of my head telling me to start it all over on the Playstation…

That reminds me, I have an article to work on about how I learned to save my gaming life by never starting a game over. No matter how much I’ve forgotten how to play or how lost I feel when I re-enter a world, re-learning the game from where I’d left off greatly improved my chances of ever finishing it.